My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a more than satisfactory arrangement and considered that she received full value for her money. We heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm over the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of everything else. In any exhibition she was to be found in ecstasy before some barely visible human visage sunk in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a floating, whitish blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, which, she told us, represented the new artistic tradition, worth all the other artistic traditions produced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna through the streets--or was that a Giotto? I was studying philology that year and had no quarrel with Angelica about that sort of thing. For all I cared, she could give her adherence to whichever artistic tradition took her fancy for the moment. But it was occasionally inconvenient to have her so slavishly tied to the studio-class on the days when they expected a criticism. Nothing could have tempted her away from one of those marvelous opportunities to profit by first-hand personal instruction from a first-rate living genius. Even when our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank to go to lunch with him at a fearfully expensive restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully expensive loge at the Français afterwards, Angelica had to go first to the studio. I went with her, so that I could carry her off directly afterwards. This is what I saw and heard in the hour I spent there. The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that morning light. Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the canvases on their easels. They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch. “We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself.